Many other specialists share this view, and cannot agree that the goal of human life was to be annihilation. Rhys Davids, for instance, thinks that Nirvâna is to be interpreted as a tranquillity of the soul, possible of achievement in this life, and that the word is best translated by the term “sanctity.” According to him, Nirvâna does not mean extinction or annihilation, but rather freedom from the great passions, such as envy and hate. Pfungst[197] agrees with Max Müller; he is convinced that the first adepts of Buddha could not have conceived of Nirvâna as extinction. Dahlmann[198] on the other hand, tries to prove that Nirvâna in its primitive signification implied the abolition of the will to live, and really corresponded to annihilation. I must add, however, that Nirvâna did not occupy a place in Buddhism so important as has been ascribed to it by several commentators. In many of the Buddhist authorities mention of Nirvâna is only accidental. In the “Lalita Vistara,” for instance, the word occurs very seldom, and then only in unimportant connections. However, the latter document contains a good deal that serves to explain the conception of Nirvâna. When the young Buddha, still very exacting, asked his father to obtain for him perpetual youth, health, life everlasting, and freedom from death, he added the following words: “Lord, if you cannot give me these four gifts, at least bring it about that after this life I shall have no more metempsychoses.”[199] As I have already stated, Buddhism had embraced the Brahmanistic doctrine of transmigration of souls. According to the legend, before his birth as a prince, the Buddha had passed hundreds of earlier existences. His soul had been the soul not only of fifty-eight kings, but of eighteen monkeys, four horses, four snakes, three lizards, two fish, and of other creatures.[200] Such continual transferences of the soul to so many different animals was a source of perplexity and sorrow to believers. It was natural that a great thinker like Buddha should have conceived the desire of sparing himself and his faithful followers so many transmigrations. He thought of these rebirths as a great evil, from which a pure life might set one free. In the poetical language of the Hindoo Buddhists, metempsychosis was compared to the ocean; the waves that change from moment to moment were the continual rebirths; our temporary body was the foam of the crests of the waves, while Nirvâna was the opposite shore. He who reaches Nirvâna would never again plunge into the great sea of Sangsâra. In a passage quoted by Rhys Davids, and ascribed to Kâma Sutta, it is stated expressly that “the sea is an image of the Sangsâra or transmigrations, while Nirvâna is an island upon it. Once the shores have been reached, a soul will no longer be plunged in the waves of the ocean, and will be freed from the successive births of metempsychosis.”